Indianapolis Colts defensive end Isaac Rochell is seen after the conclusion of the preseason NFL football game against the Detroit Lions in Detroit on Aug. 27, 2021. | Source: NurPhoto
As the topic of racism’s incestuous relationship with the NFL rears its ugly head once again, the wife of an NFL player has begun to publicly share a sampling of the racist messages she is being sent on social media in response to her interracial marriage to a Black man.
Weeks later, on Sunday, Allison Rochell decided to acknowledge the racist comments and shared screenshots of them on her Instagram Stories to provide a sample of the type of anti-Black hatred she had been receiving. She captioned her Stories with four words: “reminder this still exists.”
In one example that sums up the sentiments of all the comments she received, one person wrote, “race mixing is communism.” Another comment included monkey emojis. Yet another claimed her children would be “dysgenic,” a term defined by Merriam Webster as “tending to promote survival of or reproduction by less well-adapted individuals (such as the weak or diseased) especially at the expense of well-adapted individuals (such as the strong or healthy).”
After receiving some media attention, Allison Rochell apparently deleted the screenshots.
However, a similar post on her TikTok account, which boasts more than 660,000 followers, remained active as of Monday morning and shared the same screenshots and others.To be sure, there were plenty of people posting comments in support of the Rochells. However, that positivity was overshadowed by the glaring racist hatred being spewed in order to ruin a social media moment intended to spread love.